Technology Wishlist

Automated Bicycle Racks: Walk up with your bike, insert into a slot, pull out the key and go. Could involve buy-in ($10 for a key, you exchange your private key for the key of the slot you used) or a credit card swipe. Cities could easily implement such a system. Racks should be wireless, so they can automatically send alerts for problems (bike left in rack for over 1 week, broken rack/vandalism, rack closed without bicycle in it).

Text to email – Be able to text an email to someone. SMS sending already exists (in gmail, for example), but not the reverse. [Edit: SMS Text to email already exists as a service from most mobile carriers, but is reliant on them and does not truly dovetail with the email system very transparently]

Longer Text Messages: Double the possible length of text messages from 140 characters to 280. This would let text messaging replace many functions of basic email.

Ubiquitous Wireless Internet: Low-speed (in effect, text/html only), ubiquitous internet which can be accessed by any and all devices. Mesh networks could be used to augment the network infrastructure. Could trigger a real communications revolution: Cheap internet-capable devices available to anyone, anywhere. There is real democratization potential here. Cellphones are wonderful, but they are usually proprietary, behind paywalls and are potentially a privacy nightmare (users data is associated with their devices, cellphones usually have GPS), while internet-only devices could be built cheaply, be cheap to own (practically free) and would not (necessarily) have any user information associated with them.